Caught Up in a Struggle

stream I needed the course to make sense of the racial world that I was first introduced to as a child in Grand Rapids, Michigan.Willie James Jennings teaches theology and Africana studies at Yale Divinity School and is author of I grew up in a deeply Christian city, where almost everyone I knew—black, white, or Latinx—went to a church. I felt their frustration.I wanted to cultivate a suspicion disciplined by the desire for a shared freedom, that is, a suspicion of any identity or way of life that would imprison not just me but us together in the pull toward white death. But my metaphor betrays me, because I was actually trying to start a fire, trying to burn away the ropes and chains that cover all of us, keeping us from thinking the one unfolding of life inside the other unfolding of life.

I saw that in my own life as I journeyed through theological education and the punishing effects whiteness and the pressures to conform to European Man had on me as a professor, scholar, and administrator. Not all students resisted.

1 0 obj 3 0 obj Yet even as I was coming to see this unfolding and the freedom of the creature to live in it, I was yet working out the dilemmas of life given to me from Grand Rapids.I was the last child of 11 and the final son of five boys born to Mary and Ivory Jennings Sr. It was painful because many of the students were resistant participants who’d waited until their last year or final semester to take this required course.

Together with my cousin, we were considered the soft sons, formed of a different substance than the other boys.My mother and father felt the weight of the comparison that soon became too much for them to bear alone, so they shared that weight with me, placing it on my back day and night. By using our website and our services, you agree to our use of cookies as described in our Cookie Policy . Theology as my teachers had taught it to me was crumbling semester after semester in the southern heat of my classroom struggle as I pushed forward inside these legacies.I wish someone at the start of my journey into theological studies would have prepared me for the struggle that I found in my classroom. This was the kind of Christianity that was intellectually engaged, for the most part. I was trying to stretch exegesis like a firefighter stretching a hose to its absolute limit to put water on destructive flame. This logic has never left me.I also got caught up in the steady beat of black life.

(chorus) Caught up in a struggle You got me caught up in a struggle like that man Caught up in a struggl..

I no longer saw institutions as impersonal machines dispensing bureaucratic operation like a car assembly line. What is the relationship between the ongoing formation of our lives inside the privatization of place and the multiple inequalities this privatization engenders through the nurture of racial reasoning, class distinctions, and violence, especially against women?I felt this question long before I could articulate it.

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